Gast: Story of Astrodome a tale of prosperity, optimism

By Jim Gast

Published 2:50 pm, Saturday, July 5, 2014

Photo: Larry Reese, MBI

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FILE - This May 16, 1991, file photo, shows an aerial view of the Houston Astrodome in Houston. A glimmer of hope surfaced in the effort to keep the Houston Astrodome, the world's first multipurpose domed stadium, from being torn down with its addition this week to the National Register of Historic Places. But the designation alone will not be enough to prevent the demolition of the so-called "Eighth Wonder of the World," according to officials. (AP Photo/Houston Chronicle, Larry Reese, File) MANDATORY CREDIT

FILE - This May 16, 1991, file photo, shows an aerial view of the Houston Astrodome in Houston. A glimmer of hope surfaced in the effort to keep the Houston Astrodome, the world's first multipurpose domed

Judge Roy Hofheinz had good reason to be confident as he strode into a meeting room at Chicago's Blackstone Hotel on October 17, 1960. His presentation to the National League owners was on the agenda that day, and Hofheinz's colleagues in Houston had been at work for years laying the groundwork for this moment.

Houston, by that time the largest city in the South after years of oil-fueled prosperity, was in the hunt for a Major League Baseball team. The National League owners - for sixty years an eight-team league - finally seemed ready to deal. Texas represented a new and promising market. The owners were feeling pressure from the rival American League's expansion plans, as well as from the threat of an upstart Continental League being formed in various cities across the country. Offering franchises to two of the Continental ringleaders - one of which was the Houston syndicate Hofheinz was representing - seemed a most effective way to head off that threat.

The deal was almost certainly buttoned up: The other syndicate in contention - New Yorkers seeking to restore a second team to replace the departed Dodgers - were so certain of a favorable outcome they had not deigned to appear in Chicago that day. The Houstonians, however, had been disappointed in the past: Houston baseball deals stretching back nearly a decade had been done, then abruptly undone, and the Houston men were taking no chances. Hofheinz's presentation included a very special hook: an architectural model of a domed stadium.

The model showed a perfectly circular building surrounded by concentric rings of parking. The circular shape itself was somewhat unusual at the time: most ballparks then in existence were on urban sites and the structures tended to take on the irregular geometries of their neighborhoods or of the playing field itself. What was truly remarkable, though, was the glazed roof spanning the entire playing field and surrounding grandstands. The model's roof was removable so the old baseball men could peer inside. They saw round tiers of seats that rose above a perfectly symmetrical baseball field. There were no columns to interfere with the game or the spectators' view. The owners were told that there would be 43,000 seats and air conditioning throughout and that baseball could be played day or night, rain or shine. Construction of the stadium was, of course, contingent on the award of the franchise.

Hofheinz himself was not a man accustomed to taking "no" for an answer. After a hardscrabble childhood, he had graduated from law school at age 19, then gone on to election as a Texas state representative, Harris County judge, and most recently, two-term mayor of Houston. Now a prosperous businessman, he had been asked to join the syndicate because he understood infrastructure, politics, construction - and public financing. Brilliant but headstrong, Hofheinz was not a consensus-builder; his years in public office and his private business dealings had left a long trail of detractors, but he was known as a person who could get things done.

Although the domed stadium was nothing short of revolutionary at the time, today it is hard to view it as anything other than a necessity. Then, as now, baseball season on the Gulf Coast was a sweltering miasma of heat, humidity and afternoon thunderheads. Houston's minor league baseball team, the Buffalos, had somehow managed to eke out an existence in a small open-air stadium southeast of the city, but from the beginning Hofheinz had insisted that Major League Baseball would not succeed in Houston's climate.

The National League owners were accustomed to doing business in cooler places. Their teams played in cities concentrated in the industrial North. Texas was unfamiliar territory, and Houston had an extreme climate. Listening to Hofheinz, and eyeing the stadium model warily, Milwaukee Braves owner Lou Perini said, "People should pay to go there just to get out of the heat." But the presentation drew a round of applause.

Hofheinz later recalled: "It was the idea of a showplace stadium that sold the majors on Houston."

It is not known just how much influence the novel stadium design had on the owners' decision that day - it was unlikely, league president Warren Giles told reporters, that the exact terms of the deal would ever be made public - but that decision was unanimous. The new franchise was awarded. Houston had made the big leagues, and the domed stadium would become a reality.

Why the Astrodome matters

The small drama in Chicago on that day began a forty-year story of a highly unusual and ambitious building that would become known as the Astrodome.

Over those forty years, the Astrodome was the setting for some very compelling stories: Billie Jean King trouncing Bobby Riggs in a legendary 1973 tennis match dubbed "the Battle of the Sexes"; Evel Knievel jumping 13 cars in 1971; Houston beating UCLA in collegiate basketball's 1968 "Game of the Century"; the Mets edging the Astros in a 16-inning Game-7 showdown for the 1986 National League Championship. Even after it was retired as a sports venue, the Astrodome continued to make news as a shelter for thousands left homeless after Hurricane Katrina.

The most compelling story, however, is about the building itself.

The Astrodome is not a distinctive work of architecture. It is certainly not a bad building, nor is it an exceptionally beautiful one. The Astrodome ended its days as a major league venue in 1999, but it remains a uniquely influential building. On the simplest level, it changed the game of baseball and - in the opinion of legions of self-described purists - not for the better. If you happen to be a student of the game, you know that the artificial turf first introduced at the Astrodome changed the way baseball was played, placing a new emphasis on speed and spawning a generation of light-hitting speedsters playing on artificial turf fields with deep fences.

Off the field, the Astrodome's creature comforts and barrage of electronic media forever changed the way the game is viewed. The Dome rose alongside the growing influence of television, and stood as a response to a commercial threat posed by television. To lure paying customers away from their TV sets and into the ballpark, stadiums needed to deliver comfort and amenities on par with the spectators' living rooms. The Dome competed with television by emulating it: a comfortable seat, good food and frequent electronic distractions. If, while at Phoenix's Chase field, you find yourself engrossed in a video on the 6,200-square-foot high-definition scoreboard while enjoying curried chicken tacos with mint-marinated cucumbers and yogurt on top of scallion pancakes, you can thank - or curse - the Astrodome.

But there is an even bigger story - the tale of building the biggest room in the world, in a time of prosperity and nearly limitless optimism. It is a story that includes the inevitable stumbles, failures and unintended consequences encountered when building anything that has never been built before. The men who created the Dome had no precedent to consult. As one of them said years later, "We really didn't have any test labs; you can't go look at somebody else's Astrodome and see how they handled it." As a result, the story includes a high-profile design failure - a roof design that made it nearly impossible to play baseball. This problem was overcome swiftly and without any injuries, but not before the Dome became the butt of jokes from sportswriters and late-show talk hosts.

It is the story of an emerging city using its enormous wealth to make its mark, and of America's great migration to the suburbs in search of safety, convenience and ample parking.

It is also the story of Judge Roy Hofheinz, the Dome's impresario. A former county judge and mayor of Houston, a man who cheerfully described himself as a "huckster," a sybarite in a black suit with a 57-inch waist, Hofheinz not only created the Astrodome but also actually lived there with his wife in an impossibly lavish apartment overlooking right field. Many people helped to build the Dome, but it is no exaggeration to say that Hofheinz is the man who got it built.

Most of all, it is a story of American audacity, of building the biggest single room in history in a city with a remarkable tradition of building huge structures in a hurry.

The Dome rose in the early 1960s, alongside the manned space program and its Houston headquarters that was being built at the same time just a few miles away. Like building a rocket 30 stories high and sending it to the moon, the Astrodome was an exercise in innovation - and audacity. Like the NASA scientists and engineers working on the space program, the builders of the Astrodome had to devise solutions for problems that had never existed. Like the problems that cropped up in the space program, the problems of the Astrodome had to be solved under an impossibly tight, self-imposed deadline.

And like the space program, the Astrodome came to be because a group of Americans decided it should, and then just went ahead and did it.

The Astrodome was conceived and built "because a group of Americans decided it should be done, and then just went ahead and did it," concludes Jim Gast, author of "The Astrodome: Building an American Spectacle." Gast, an architect specializing in large-scale public infrastructure projects, writes about the people, technology and politics that built the biggest room in the world. These are excerpts of the book.